Veil - 10/31/17


This is a drawing of a fly. It's more muted than the last two drawings that I've done. I've been in a more quiet mood over the past week. Lots of school work and projects to do and the weather became cool again recently.

A couple of weeks ago we talked about how there are moth characters in two Shakespeare plays: Love's Labor's Lost, and A Midsummer Night's Dream. I haven't had time to investigate these but I did find an essay by Virginia Woolf called "The Death of The Moth": http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks12/1203811h.html#ch-02. The essay is much darker (more morbid) than how I feel about the series that I've been making but I still thought it was a beautiful essay.

Here is one passage from the last paragraph:
It was useless to try to do anything. One could only watch the extraordinary efforts made by those tiny legs against an oncoming doom which could, had it chosen, have submerged an entire city, not merely a city, but masses of human beings; nothing, I knew, had any chance against death. Nevertheless after a pause of exhaustion the legs fluttered again. It was superb this last protest, and so frantic that he succeeded at last in righting himself. One's sympathies, of course, were all on the side of life. Also, when there was nobody to care or to know, this gigantic effort on the part of an insignificant little moth, against a power of such magnitude, to retain what no one else valued or desired to keep, moved one strangely. 

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